Category Archives: Deep Dive>Critical thinking

Conspiracy theories and poor thinking without facts, oh my!

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Help me decipher the article I just read. (I responded to it here.) I’m used to some sort of argument when reading articles from the other side, but this one stands alone. There were plenty of claims—climate change is not detectable, the COVID vaccine was mishandled, the scientific consensus is meaningless, and so on—but there were neither justifications for those claims nor links to justifications. The article might serve to remind the faithful of popular talking points, but it did nothing to justify any argument.

Oddly, the question of evidence and justification did come up.

There’s little point engaging the [Leftist] cult on the surface, getting tangled in its least important, largely decorative aspects. That is to say, in the rational arguments and factual claims that leftists present.

Ah—problem solved. It must be the Left that doesn’t have arguments.

Read Zmirak’s article to see that he has conclusions but no argument. He fills the gap with confidence and bluster. This attempted reversal is like the lawyer’s adage, “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; if you have the law on your side, pound the law; if you have neither, pound the table.”

The tagline for The Stream is, “Equipping Christians to Think Clearly About the Political, Economic, and Moral Issues of Our Day.” They’re certainly not equipping any clear thinking with this argument-free article. I propose instead, “The Stream: now with bigger bravado and fewer facts!”

This handwaving sounds like Two Minutes Hate from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was two minutes of unhinged ranting aimed at the listeners’ emotions, not their intellects.

Those darned elites, always messing things up

Here’s a puzzle maybe you can help unravel. Sprinkled through the article were various references to how the Left is trying to accumulate power, with climate change just the latest in a series of invented calamities.

What they care about [among other things is] the political or economic power they gain over helpless strangers, whom they can corral, starve, geld, or even (if need be) kill … as if they were cattle.

Huh? What power is he talking about? This and the Nazi agenda need to be spelled out and justified.

And are we to believe that the Right is now the champion of the downtrodden, the voice of the disenfranchised?

You’re the target of a global influence campaign by wealthy, white elites in a small number of countries who wish to centralize all economic and political power in their own hands. They might call it “sustainability” or “the Great Reset,” but what it amounts to is a planetary coup d’etat by the richest of the rich, who wish to pull up the ladder behind themselves, and enshrine their power as permanent.

(The Great Reset is a 2020 initiative from the World Economic Forum [the group that meets in Davos every year] to rebuild after the COVID pandemic.)

Wait a minute—isn’t Zmirak himself in this category of wealthy, white elites? I don’t know how wealthy he is, but as an editor of The Stream, he’s certainly influential. Maybe he’s okay with wealthy, white elites accumulating power if he’s part of the group. And maybe whatever he’s railing against is just hollow conspiracy theories whipped up for that purpose. That would explain why he can’t support his claims with evidence.

Remember the past “scientific consensuses” that just happened—by sheer coincidence—to demand the centralization of power over the masses in the hands of rich, white elites.

Germ theory is a scientific consensus. Are you furious at the power that doctors have when they prescribe antibiotics? Or Big Bang theory or atomic theory or Newton’s laws of motion? Or continental drift, thermodynamics, Relativity, or heliocentrism? I didn’t get the memo—point out the available political power behind these scientific theories, because I might like a piece of that.

And what’s up with the evil elites being white? That makes him sound surprisingly woke.

The fact that a claim by elites about an “apocalyptic” crisis would grant them vast, arbitrary power over millions or billions of people is by itself sufficient to make their claims highly dubious. They’re partisan, they’re biased, their hands are in your pockets already stealing your wallet and keys.

This handwaving sounds like Two Minutes Hate from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was two minutes of unhinged ranting aimed at the listeners’ emotions, not their intellects.

Here again this sounds like projection—seeing in your opponent your own bad traits. Or maybe since grabbing power, seemingly at all costs, is how they operate, they can’t imagine their opponents not doing the same.

Am I missing something? You may understand the thinking on the Right better than I do and can find the inner logic in this rant. Share your thoughts in the comments.

I’ve responded to other articles in The Stream:

Make the lie big,
make it simple,
keep saying it,
and eventually they will believe it.
— a paraphrase of Hitler’s definition of a “big lie”